“WELL, there are long and short answers,” says Claire Dunn when asked why she chose to spend a year in the Australian bush in a shelter made from eucalyptus saplings lashed together and thatched with blady grass.

“It was partly a case of running away from a life that wasn’t serving me anymore, and partly running towards the thing that made me feel more alive than anything.”

Dunn traded in a broken relationship and her job as a desk-bound conservationist, for a year in the bush. “I rarely got the opportunity to be in that world that I was saving,” she says of the “life-changing” time spent in northern New South Wales’ Gumbaynggirr Nation.

Claire trying to light a fire with no matches. She’s using a Grasstree stalk and no small measure of elbow grease to coax a coal from the wood shavings in the notch in her Wild Tobacco baseboard. Picture: Australian GeographicSource:Supplied

In that year, Dunn endured a sweltering summer in the dry sandstone country: “It was so hot and humid for most of the day, you couldn’t do much. I had a wide-brimmed Akubra hat and wore long-sleeved cotton shirts and tried to be down at the waterhole for the bulk of the day,” she says.

As for winter, she would light a fire in the morning — quite an involved task without matches — or go walking for hours in a cloak with an even hood hand-sewn from a woollen blanket: “My fingers and toes were freezing.”

The landscape “had every kind of spiky plant you could imagine and everything that would want to bite or scratch you was there”, she says.

“It’s absolutely stunning, but it reveals its beauty slowly. It takes a bit of time to really appreciate the beauty of the Australian bush.”

Building your house from dried grass has its hazards. "You're always worried it could catch alight," says Claire, "That would be the worst possible thing". Picture: Australian GeographicSource:Supplied

Dunn, now 35, grew up in the New South Wales Hunter Valley with three brothers and one sister. As a child she had “absolutely loved” Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree series. Later, as a young adult, she read Robyn Davidson’s memoir Tracks — “A woman on a mission of self-discovery was something that always fascinated me,” she says.

In between there were shifts dressed as a koala soliciting donations for the Wilderness Society on Sydney streets, and her grown-up office job as a conservationist. Then Dunn enrolled in the Nature Philosophy program, run by Kate Rydge and Sam Robertson.

From their homestead, Rydge and Robertson offer earth skills courses and a year-long residential program. In the year that Dunn went bush, she shared the property with five others. The participants built individual shelters and would go to town for food supplies once a month.

A short hike from home, the Sunrise Tree provides an elevated view of the Banksia heath around Claire Dunn's camp. Picture: Australian GeographicSource:Supplied

“Towards the end, I didn’t want to leave the land,” says Dunn. “I didn’t want to go into town.” Dunn would check her email every fortnight at Rydge’s house and laughs that she was so cut off she didn’t realise there was a federal election until the day before.

“One of the main things I confronted that year,” says Dunn, “was all the ways I was conditioned to be striving and ambitious. Even though I set myself goals, I would come up against [such questions as:] ‘Who am I without my neighbours, my routine?’ And you realise how much of your identity is structured around your routine and your set role in society.

“It was actually a painful process of undoing those patterns, confronting the self-pity. I feel like I got cracked open. There were times where I thought the ways I knew myself weren’t there anymore. I feel like it was actually an initiation into a different way of thinking. I feel a lot softer and like well worn-in leather.”

Claire Dunn, in a shelter. Picture: Australian GeographicSource:Supplied

Dunn turned her experience into a newly released memoir, My Year Without Matches. But there’s a tension in Dunn’s story between opting out and writing a book about the experience, an altogether different and ambitious venture.

“The book has been a whole other solitary wilderness in itself,” she says. “It’s been really, really difficult. It’s put me behind a computer for long hours and in solitude. It forced me to question: ‘Am I being sucked back into that pattern of being ambitious and having a book to my name? Why am I doing this?’”

I ask Kate Rydge, her facilitator, about this contradiction.

“Claire’s a writer,” says Rydge calmly. “She was journalling her experience throughout the year. I don’t think she escaped for a year. What she did was move closer towards knowing who she is, devoid of any feedback loops.

“I think the world needs people who actually go into these deeply personal experiences, in the wild of nature, and are able to bring that wild out. It’s definitely a theme for humanity now. We need to understand it more. We’re not separate from it. I champion it.”